Places in the Dark

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Because she was so … she looked so…”

  “She looked human, Cal.” He saw that all talk of the horrible condition in which I’d found our mother still disturbed me, and shrugged. “Anyway, Dora and I plan to go out to the cottage later this afternoon. I thought you might want to join us. We wouldn’t stay for very long. I know you need to … I mean, it being Saturday, I know you have things to do in Royston.”

  He meant that I could linger on Fox Creek for only a little while before heading for my weekly rendezvous with my whore.

  “I really would like you to come along, Cal,” he added emphatically. “We don’t get together as often as we used to. And besides, I’d like you to get to know Dora better. Come on, Cal, join us.”

  There was no way to refuse the brightness of his smile, the innocence of his offer. For a moment, he was a young boy again, urging me to help him take his homemade raft to Fox Creek. And so I agreed.

  I got to Fox Creek a few minutes before the appointed time. The little house in which my mother had chosen to spend her final years stood nestled in a grove of evergreen. I could imagine her sitting on its small porch, humming a scrap of Mozart, a book of poetry in her lap. The Great Example in the fullness of her solitude. I thought of how often I’d worked to please her, to shine somehow in her eyes, perhaps prove that what I lacked in passion I made up for in reason, that she and Billy could survive and flourish only in a world that men like my father and me, cool-headed and realistic, had made safe for dreamers. And yet, for all my effort, I knew that I’d never gained any portion of the sweet regard she’d so generously heaped upon my brother, never felt in me the deep delight she took in him.

  Some aspect of this dark truth was probably in my face when Billy and Dora arrived, though my brother was too much in love by then to allow anything to dampen his own exultant mood. I could see it in the lightness of his stride as he came toward me. In finding Dora, Billy seemed to believe that he’d grasped something amazing, that rare form of love that flowers ever more beautifully as beauty fades, endures every shock and sorrow, the green vine of his romance already aging toward a ruby richness, his love, at last, like wine.

  “Wonderful day, isn’t it, Cal?” He was dressed in linen trousers and an open-collared white shirt, his head topped with a rumpled felt hat, a figure truly splendid, very nearly radiant.

  “Yes, it is,” I said, my eyes moving reflexively to Dora.

  She stood beside him in a long-sleeved dress with slightly puffed shoulders. Like all her attire, it seemed selected for the maximum of coverage.

  “Hello, Cal.” She glanced about, taking the general lay of the area, her eyes following a line of purple crocuses that had just sprouted along the edge of the creek. “What a lovely place.”

  Billy pointed toward the cottage. “We’ve kept it as a memorial to our mother,” he said to Dora. “All her things are still there.”

  “Most of them,” I said, referring to the fact that Billy was continually taking some little token from it, a napkin or a bud vase. “I guess you know by now that my brother calls her The Great Example.”

  “Which she is,” Billy said quite seriously.

  With that, he led us across the lawn, mounted the wooden stairs, and opened the door of the house in which I’d found my mother in her helpless sprawl. It was a vision that met me at the threshold, so that I suddenly recoiled and stepped back onto the porch, leaving my brother and Dora to explore the cottage.

  From my place just outside the door, I watched as the two of them drifted slowly about the cottage, Billy occasionally lifting some curio my mother had accumulated. I noticed Dora move her finger along the side of the little desk by the window. She seemed to be gathering something from it, my mother’s thoughts and memories, as if such things lay like a film of dust upon the objects we left behind.

  As the minutes passed, Billy grew increasingly expansive, spinning tales of The Great Example, utterly unmindful that I remained outside, still shaken by the memory of my mother’s lying faceup, those yellow stains, the smell, the filth, the horrible indignity of it all. He walked into another room, leaving Dora behind just long enough for her to glance in my direction, glimpse the seething in my eyes. In a single fluid movement, seamless as a breeze, she swept over to me, touched my arm, then whispered, “What’s the matter, Cal?”

  “The way she looked when I found her,” I said. “Why can’t I get it out of my head?”

  “Because you love her.”

  “So does Billy, but—” I stopped, still unable to speak the truth.

  Dora waited.

  And it came.

  “But she loves him back,” I said. “Sometimes I think she even taught him how to love. You know, with all his heart.”

  “What did she teach you?”

  I smiled thinly. “The opposite lesson, I suppose.”

  “Which was?”

  “How to live without it.”

  I expected Dora to offer some small commiseration, perhaps a counterargument of some kind. But instead of a well-intentioned, banal aside, the words dropped from her mouth like shards of ice. “There are worse lessons than living without love.”

  “Do you think so?”

  She started to answer, but at that moment Billy sailed onto the porch and grabbed her hand. “Let’s walk over to the bridge,” he urged.

  It was only a short walk to the bridge, my mother’s cottage still clearly visible behind us. Some of the bulbs my mother had planted here and there were beginning to inch their way into the spring air, scattering sparks of red and gold across our path.

  “This is where my father proposed to my mother,” Billy told Dora as he led her to the center of the bridge, a rickety, unstable old thing that shook slightly as they walked onto it. When they reached the center, he let go of Dora’s hand, leaned over the wooden rail, stared into the rapid water below. “I made a raft once. Tried to sail all the way across.” He looked up and grinned at me. “Remember, Cal?”

  “I remember that you saved a little girl’s life instead,” I said, recalling the gleam and glory of his dive. “Have you told Dora about that?”

  “No,” Dora said. “He hasn’t.”

  Billy smiled. “We did it together,” he told her. “Cal and I.”

  “You’re the one who plunged in after her,” I reminded him.

  He gazed at me affectionately. “But you’re the one who plunged in after me.”

  With that, he seized Dora’s hand again, tugging her off the bridge and along the water’s edge.

  “I still sometimes wonder what Mother thought about,” Billy said once we’d reached the spot where she had spent long hours, reading silently on a small red blanket.

  “The past,” I said.

  He looked at me quizzically. “Why not the future?”

  “She didn’t have a future by then.”

  “Of course she did,” Billy replied. “She’d left Dad. She’d chosen to live her own life. Her future was completely open.”

  “No future is ever open,” I said bleakly.

  Billy shook his head and laughed. “You are a dark force, Cal. You are truly a dark force. Isn’t he, Dora?”

  She kept her eyes on the water. “Yes.”

  We sat down beside the water, Billy and Dora close together, I apart, my back pressed against a tree.

  Seeing them so close, my brother’s arm at Dora’s waist, filled me with a strange unease, a restlessness that finally drove me away from them, where I stood alone, smoking idly, now eager to be on my way to Royston, the sweet oblivion of a brothel bed.

  “I want to get something from the cottage,” Billy said suddenly. He hastily got to his feet. “I’ll meet you two at the car.”

  With that he bounded off toward the cottage, leaving Dora and me beside the water. I scooped up a small stone and plopped it into the creek. When I glanced back toward the cottage, Billy was coming out of it, carrying a small blue vase.

  “He keeps taking things from the house,”
I said. “Pieces of her.”

  Dora looked at me pointedly. “Be careful, Cal,” she said.

  “Of what?”

  “Of needing love too much.”

  I laughed. “I think it’s my brother who has that problem.”

  Her eyes were very still. “No,” she said. “It’s you.”

  No one had ever spoken to me with such disturbing intimacy, and all during the drive to Royston that evening, I replayed the moment, the stillness in Dora’s eyes, the way she’d said “It’s you” with such certainty that it was me, rather than my brother, who was perilously in need of love.

  I was still brooding on what she’d said when I arrived on Blyden Street at just after six. Night had fallen, the lights of the town shimmering on the water. I could hear the piano in the bar next door, the steady hum of the crowd inside.

  Maggie Flynn sat on the porch as I came up the steps, fanning herself languidly in the warm night air. She’d pulled her dress up, and her large round knees shone like pale orbs as she drifted back and forth in the old wooden swing.

  “I’d just about given up on you, Cal,” she said.

  Normally I would have gone directly upstairs, but an inexpressible heaviness pressed me down upon the step. I took off my hat, fanned my face, then lit a cheroot. “I’ll go in shortly.”

  “Want a drink?” Maggie asked.

  “Not yet.”

  I blew a column of smoke into the night air.

  Maggie eyed me closely. “How long you been coming here, Cal?”

  I took another draw on my cigar. “Twelve, thirteen years, I guess.”

  “Long time. You still single?”

  “Yeah.”

  She smiled and nodded. “You were just a kid when you first showed up.” “I was twenty-one.”

  She laughed. “A kid to me.” The laughter trailed off. “You look a little out of sorts tonight.”

  “Just tired.”

  “Maybe you’re getting tired of us.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It happens,” she said with a shrug. “A man starts needing more.”

  “I don’t need more.”

  Maggie’s gaze was piercing. “Don’t be so sure. It hits you like a hammer.”

  I felt a strange alarm, rose quickly, tossed my cigar into the street, and went inside. My regular met me in the front parlor, poured me a drink, then escorted me up the stairs. Down the corridor we passed Polly Jenks’s room, empty now.

  “Polly finally quit,” she said. “Left on Wednesday.”

  “So who does Mr. Castleman see now?”

  “Me,” she answered airily.

  In her room, I took my usual position, lying on my back in the bed while she undressed behind the screen.

  “Do you want another drink?” she asked when she emerged.

  “No.”

  “You got here late,” she murmured as she curled on the bed and began to untie my shoes.

  “I had more work than usual.”

  “Something big?”

  “Not really.”

  “So, there’s nothing new in Port Alma?”

  The answer sprang from my mouth before I could stop it. “My brother’s in love,” I said.

  “That’s nice,” she said cheerfully. She drew off the second shoe, placed it beside the other, then crawled up the bed and sat down beside me. “You like the woman, the one your brother’s in love with?”

  “She’s interesting.”

  She leaned forward, her lips poised at mine, but careful not to kiss me. Her breath smelled faintly of meringue.

  “Well, that’s enough about her,” she said. She got to her feet, let the robe fall open, then took it off entirely and sat naked upon me. “You’re here to be with me.” She unbuckled my belt, gently tugged it from my trousers, and twined it sensually through her stubby fingers. “To have a good time.” She took my hands and cupped her breasts within them. Sitting astride me, peering down, she was utterly confident of her skills, an Eve who’d learned the lessons of the ancient garden,taken charge of the serpent, knew just how it would answer her command. She raked her nails languidly over my chest, pretending to find me desirable. Then she bent forward and whispered in my ear. “Who am I?”

  My mind had already begun to wander. “What?”

  “My name. Who do you want to be with tonight?”

  It never left my lips, but the way it flashed into my mind, so swiftly and spontaneously, should have rung like a fire bell in the night.

  Dora.

  Chapter Fifteen

  We think of our destruction as something that falls upon us abruptly, in a sudden rush of wind and fire. But I’ve come to believe that our fall slinks through the undergrowth instead, creeps from one place to the next around the little shelter we’ve built until, at last, it finds the single rotted board we neglected to replace, the crevice we left unsealed, that place in the dark it can nudge through, and slither in.

  And yet, for all that, I could have avoided it. From the moment I’d stepped into Dora’s cottage that rain-swept afternoon, whispered her name, then glimpsed my brother in the shadows at the other side of the room, I’d recognized the one thing I could have done to prevent the catastrophe that had instantly overwhelmed me. I could have stayed away from Dora. I could have controlled my own steadily building impulse and determined never to be alone with her. I might even have taken a passionless pride in such self-control.

  At first, I tried to do exactly that. I dove into the petty cases Hap tossed onto my desk as if they had the gravest importance. I stopped walking by the Sentinel. Had I seen her coming toward me, I would have crossed to the other side of the street. At home, safely alone, I sank into my books, and occasionally the bottle.

  But as the days passed, Dora intruded upon me. While hunched over some document in my office, I’d lift my eyes, certain she was in the room, and be disappointed—even angry—when she wasn’t.

  And so, one warm June evening, as I sat on my front porch, finishing off a second brandy, I called to her as she walked past the house, no doubt on the way home from the Sentinel. It was the first time in a month that her name had passed my lips.

  “Dora.”

  She stiffened, as if a hand had gripped her shoulder from behind.

  “It’s Cal,” I said, rising from my chair, waving my glass slightly. “Here. On the porch. I didn’t mean to startle you. I just happened to see you passing by.” An idea came out of the blue, kicked up, as it has since seemed to me, by a cloven foot. “I thought you might want to see my drawings. The ones Billy told you about.”

  She hesitated for an instant, perhaps to gauge my intent. Then she nodded and came up the stairs.

  “I was on my way home,” she said when she joined me.

  “I thought so,” I said. “Is Billy still at the office?”

  “No, he’s gone to Royston. To buy paper.”

  A salty night breeze toyed with a strand of her hair. I grew bold enough to return it to its place. “So, you’re alone for the evening.”

  “Yes.”

  I smiled. “You once asked me if I liked solitude. Do you?”

  She peered at me distantly. “I’m used to it.”

  “You must have lived alone for quite some time, then.”

  “Long enough not to be afraid of it.”

  “Years, I suppose.”

  “Yes, years,” she answered, as if challenging me to ask her more.

  Instead, I retreated back to an earlier subject. “Well, let me show you those drawings.”

  We walked inside the house, down the corridor, and into my study. It was the room in which I spent most of my time, and which, over the years, I’d turned into a kind of inner sanctum. Thick curtains were drawn over the windows, and an Oriental carpet covered the wide pine floors. The room had been decorated according to my taste, which tended toward heavy furniture and somber colors. Billy had always found the room uncomfortable, teasing that it reminded him of a funeral parlor.

&n
bsp; “What a quiet place,” Dora said as she entered it.

  “Billy calls it my tomb.”

  She looked at me. “More like a burrow, I think.”

  “Well, I’m the only one who burrows here, that’s for sure.”

  The drawings hung in various places on the walls, some well lighted, some in shadow. There were a few still lifes, but most were of stone walls and wooden fences, rigid pastorals that portrayed the security of limits.

  As I watched, Dora walked from one drawing to the next, always taking time to stop, gaze, ponder. She seemed remarkably at peace as she moved about the room, as if she inevitably felt safer and less exposed in worlds created by others, particularly imagined ones, where nothing real could intrude upon her, seize her unawares.

  “Not very exciting stuff, I know,” I said when she’d looked at the final picture, a stone wall that ran through an otherwise open field.

  She smiled, then made a second sweep of the room, this time eyeing the books rather than the drawings.

  “I like the way you look at books, Dora,” I said as I came up behind her.

  “They gave me a place to go.” She drew a single volume from the shelf, opened it. “I remember this.”

  I looked at the title. Pascal’s Pensées.

  “He says that people are unhappy because they prefer the hunt to the capture,” Dora said.

  “And you think he’s right?”

  “Not for everyone.”

  “How about you?”

  “Not for me at all,” she answered bluntly.

  “Then you must find Billy very refreshing.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because all he’s ever wanted to find and capture was his one true love.”

  She lowered her eyes to the book. “William is noble” was all she said.

  My brother’s character suddenly struck me as a vaguely charged subject. I decided to leave it. “I know your secret now.”

  Her eyes darted toward me.

  “You’re a Catholic,” I said with a smile. “Only Catholics read Pascal. My mother, before she left the Church. And a few odd ducks like me.”

  She closed the book and returned it to the shelf. “Thank you for inviting me in, Cal.”

  “If you saw anything you’d like to read…”